The WVSSAC announced Friday that 12 additional schools will be reclassified for the 2024 football season following the Dept. of Education Board of Review’s decision to grant the appeals of 11 schools on Monday.
Buckhannon Upshur, Capital, Riverside and South Charleston will drop form Class AAAA to Class AAA immediately while Chapmanville, Independence, Lincoln, Nicholas County, PikeView and Sissonville will drop from Class AAA to AA. Ritchie County and Summers County will drop from Class AA to Class A under the latest structure.
“We have been working diligently to work through the logistics and implications of the Board of Review’s mandate since Monday,’” David Price, WVSSAC Executive Director said via a press release. “We’re now looking forward to getting competitions started here very soon.”
The change is for this football season alone.
The decision comes after several schools were unhappy with where they were classified following the release of the new four-classification system in December of 2023.
Numerous schools originally appealed the decision and were denied.
Two separate sources close to the situation told Lootpress after the WVSSAC denied those initial appeals, the schools individually took their appeals a step further to the Board of Review, an entity of the Dept. of Education. From there the BOR remanded the WVSSAC to listen to the schools’ appeals once more.
The SSAC again denied those appeals, bouncing the 11 schools back to the Board of Review. The BOR then upheld the appeals and reclassified all the appellant schools for the upcoming football season, citing the impending season as a reason to act. The BOR further remanded the classification issue on all other sports to the SSAC’s Board of Directors for further action, with the BOR noting that the current system does not achieve competitive balance and that the appeals should have all been granted.
FILE_3270Given the language of the BOR’s decision that cited safety concerns, the SSAC likely elected to drop all schools with a lower total score than the highest winning appellant’s total score down a class.
Preston (Class AAAA, 61.2), Sissonville (Class AAA, 38.0) and St. Marys (Class AA 25.5) were the appellant schools with the highest total scores in their classes that moved down. Riverside (61.3) was the lone school that didn’t appeal and didn’t fall below Preston’s 61.2 total score but still bumped down.
The contrast between Riverside, which had the 17th highest total score in the state, and Beckley which sat at 16 with a score of 67.8, was stark enough to include it in the latest shift. The 6.5 point difference between Beckley and Riverside is the largest between two consecutive schools in the state.
Final Copy of WVSSAC Competition Models - 2023 Version 3The SSAC confirmed to Lootpress that the rating points schools receive from beating a team would be reflected based on the classification they play in this season. As an example Oak Hill, which was worth 15 base points in Class AAAA will now be worth 12 points since it will play this season in Class AAA. Class AAA schools that moved down to Class AA will be worth nine points instead of 12 while Class A schools will be worth six.
“Quite honestly it’s not going to impact us too much,” Nicholas County head coach Gene Morris said. “The point differential might change. When we signed the contracts we all thought we’d get 12 points for beating each other. It wouldn’t be a fair thing for the teams we play to get nine points instead of 12. It’s not surprising it happened. It looked like that was in the works for awhile. We thought that might happen as it rolled out for Sissonville, Wayne and Frankfort. When we knew that those schools were winning the appeal and going down, we thought everyone below them would probably go down.”
